the gender of language

[erratio]

The other day I was wondering: The language reflects the culture of a people, right? Like the Japanese have a million and one honorifics because social status is extremely important to them. So, how does gendering of a language reflect culture/shape people's thoughts? By gendering I mean languages like Hebrew which not only require verbs to agree with gender when talking about people but assign gender to all nouns based mostly on the way they sound.

The distribution of gendered nouns isn't quite what you would expect it to be; not all objects stereotypically used by females are of the feminine gender and vice versa. And when coining neologisms, how much consideration does gender get?

Also, one might think that a non-gendered language would belong to a culture that doesn't have strong gender roles, except English shows this to be a lie straight away. It started losing its genders in the Middle English period, whihc doesn't correlate at all with feminism etc.

Comments

Working and sinning

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting! Are you familiar with the etymology of the word, "robot"? It comes from Russian робота ('robota', if I spelt that correctly) and means "work". Thing is, робота is a feminine noun, so the suffix (-/а/) was removed in order to make it masculine. The reason for that (as my Russian teacher once informed me) is that, according to the Russian inventor of the robotic hand, women don't work.

I think that neologisms are often weighed up in this manner, the better to consider the latent 'gender' of a particular object/concept: absurd, really, when you consider that grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological sex anyway.

And I have to respond as well to your observations regarding the Japanese and their prolific dispensation of honorifics! I have also often thought of the manner in which cultures will possess an abundance of words for a particular thing, related to their being in possession of an abundance of that object. The Innuit with their words for snow is an example that springs readily to mind. What do you think this says for the ancient Egyptians and their dozens of words for "sin"?

Re: Working and sinning

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was tempted to go for the 'snow' analogy but I read somewhere that that story is largely apocryphal, or at least wrong in one or more important details. One would naturally assume the ancient Egyptians must have been a very god-fearing and pious people, which is suppose is on par for a culture where the afterlife gets so much detailing.
And that makes me wonder how many words for sin are possessed by the older versions of Italian, being home to the Catholic Church and all..

Re: Working and sinning

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, it probably is inaccurate, but then think of how many words we have for things like sin as well. Proof of that lies in the fact that there are so many differing words for the phenomenon used in the Hebrew Bible, and they each get different English words in standard translations.

I have to quote Douglas Adams here, whether or not it's relevant ("So Long and Thanks For All the Fish", chap. 2):

"He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbour's boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on."

[axl12.livejournal.com]

gendered nouns don't make sense to me

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, I agree. I think that they should be just called "Class 1" and "Class 2" nouns because they have nothing to do with biological sex.

Gender of language

[(Anonymous)]

What's even funnier in Hebrew is that the words for almost every single body part is in the feminine, except the word for "breast", which is in the masculine.

Re: Gender of language

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the British series Coupling? Thanks to it, I will never forget the word shadayim..

But on a more on-topic note, do you know why this is? I'm guessing there was probably some kind of weird logic behind it originally

Re: Gender of language

[(Anonymous)]

I have absolutely no idea. One of those great quirks of language, I guess. I have, in fact, seen Coupling, but not the episode where "Shadayim" is mentioned. It's quite a funny series, though a bit repetitive.
Daniel

Re: Gender of language

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Ah, the episode concerns an Israeli woman with large shadayim, and thanks to a complete language barrier Geoff ends up thinking that that's her name. It was a really well done episode too. They switch between Geoff's point of view and the Israeli's (during the Israeli's point of view Geoff speaks Italian I think)